Just Baking

With very few exceptions, I’m a scratch baker. Occasionally I’ll use a brownie mix, or I’ll employ a cake mix as the base for a coffee cake, but by and large, I like to assemble my own batters from scratch.

I have a recipe for sugar cookies that I love. It produces beautiful, delicious cookies and performs consistently. It’s not too labor intensive for a sugar-cookie recipe, and it can be easily converted from a drop cookie to a rolled-cookie dough.

Two summers ago, my daughter received a set of “USA” letter-shapes cookie cutters that were perfect to make cookies for our Fourth of July barbecue. The cottage we were vacationing in had limited stores, and not wanting to stock up on flour, baking powder, and pantry staples that wouldn’t be used up during our stay, we picked up a couple of pouches of Betty Crocker’s Sugar Cookie mix.

Each 17.5-ounce pouch requires just an egg, 1 tablespoon of flour, and 1/3 cup of butter to produce about two dozen rolled-out cookies. The dough was soft but not sticky, so it was easy to work with. The cookies baked evenly and didn’t brown too quickly. We frosted them with storebought vanilla frosting (hey, we were on vacation!). Admittedly, it was pretty much a sugar overload, but they were fun and cute for the Fourth. The cookies were a hit with both kids and adults.

I recently tested the mix again, this time at home in my own kitchen. I made these as drop cookies, which is even simpler: all you need are 1 egg and 1 stick of butter (no need for the flour). Dropped from a rounded tablespoon or a medium cookie scoop, the pouch yields about two dozen cookies. 

Without the addition of flour to firm up the dough, these were soft and spread easily. Make sure the pan is completely cool before you scoop the dough onto it, or you will end up with cookies roughly the diameter and thickness of compact discs.

These are sweeter than the average homemade sugar cookie, but if you want cookies in a hurry and don’t have time to put together your own, Betty Crocker’s are a good option.